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FILM; Cracking the Color Code of 'Hero'

By ROBERT MACKEY

Published: August 15, 2004

THE martial-arts epic ''Hero,'' which opens on Aug. 27, is the product of an unlikely collaboration between two dazzling visual stylists: the Chinese director Zhang Yimou and the Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle. That they had never before worked together is not surprising. Mr. Zhang (''Raise the Red Lantern,'' ''Shanghai Triad''), a former cameraman, is known for the quiet beauty of his carefully composed shots; Mr. Doyle (''In the Mood for Love,'' ''Chungking Express''), who prides himself on his ability to improvise with the camera on his shoulder, prefers, as he says to ''find the film'' as he is shooting it. Mr. Zhang makes still lifes; Mr. Doyle is an action painter.

Why then did Mr. Zhang pick Mr. Doyle to shoot ''Hero,'' his first attempt at a martial-arts movie with digitized action sequences in the style of ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''? According to Mr. Zhang, it was because Mr. Doyle is known for pushing film to its limits in order to produce extraordinary hues, and Mr. Zhang's plan was to divide ''Hero'' into five sections, each dominated by a single color.

The outcome of the collaboration is a spectacular film that looks like nothing that either man has done before. ''Hero'' tells and retells one story three times: how an anonymous assassin in ancient China overcomes three rivals. Two of the versions are false, one true. And they seem to come from different worlds: a red one, a blue one and a white one. ''Obviously,'' Mr. Doyle says ''it's our 'Rashomon.' ''

Add to this a frame tale dominated by shades of black, and a series of flashbacks infused with vibrant greens, and you have a film that functions like a prism.

While Mr. Zhang and Mr. Doyle insist the choice of colors was aesthetic, not symbolic, the coloration itself becomes the movie's theme. ''Part of the beauty of the film is that it is one story colored by different perceptions,'' Mr. Doyle says. ''I think that's the point. Every story is colored by personal perception.'' ROBERT MACKEY

RED (top left)

Punctuating the flying swordplay of ''Hero'' is a love story between two fabled assassins: Broken Sword, played by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (top left, top right, bottom right) and Flying Snow, played by Maggie Cheung (above). Red was the first color Mr. Zhang chose, which presented Mr. Doyle with an immediate problem: in his work with Hong Kong directors like Wong Kar-wai, Mr. Doyle had made a conscious effort not to use the color. ''Up until 'In the Mood for Love,' '' he says, ''we avoided red at all costs. I think I've probably said on at least 25 films, 'No red,' because it has too many associations in Asia.'' Then he had to find a way to produce images that would match the unusual red of the hand-dyed costumes. To do this he decided to switch from Fuji, the film brand used for most of the film, to Kodak. ''The red is a Kodak red,'' he said. ''It's a much more saturated solid red.''

BLUE (top right)

The filmmakers decided to stage the climax of the second story on a magnificent lake in the Jiuzhaigou cq region of China, and the color of the water, they say, inspired them to make this section blue. As Mr. Doyle explains: ''We knew that one section should be red, but we weren't sure what the other colors were. And so we wandered around China looking for spaces that were interesting or unexpected or perhaps hadn't been shot before. And we said, 'Oh, this might work for this, therefore this section is this color.' It kind of evolved organically.'' The resulting lack of contrast between characters and setting was intentional. ''The thing about color is that it's like light,'' Mr. Doyle says. ''In order to see darkness on film, you need a bright spot in some part of the frame. In other words, you need a contrast. In this film you're totally surrounded by one color, and that's very rare.''

WHITE (bottom left)

In the third section of ''Hero,'' When Maggie Cheung rushes to save her lover in the third section of ''Hero,'' she rides by a dramatic backdrop of cliffs that, Mr. Doyle says, ''look like old walls falling apart.'' Having decided to shoot a key part of the third tale in a desert near the border with Kazakhstan, the filmmakers picked the white of the desert at noon for the costumes in this section. When it came to actually shooting there, however, the crew found the desert at noon beautiful but unendurable; they had to wait until later in the day to shoot, when it was cool enough to work. ''The white became a little bit warmer than white,'' Mr. Doyle notes, ''because of the evening light.''

GREEN (bottom right)

Woven through the variously colored stories of ''Hero'' are green flashbacks -- in the one above, Mr. Leung enters a palace hung with floating green curtains. While most of the movie's bold colors were achieved by using filters and processing the film in unusual ways and using filters , the curtains had to be color-corrected on a computer to get the exact shade the filmmakers were after. Mr. Doyle, an Australian who made his name in Asian cinema, is impatient with universal theories of color like the one offered by the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro: ''Storaro says green is the color of knowledge. Well, I've done many films where green was the color of memory, and that's just a personal choice. Actually, in 'Hero' we used green for the flashbacks because we ran out of colors. We'd done all the other stuff. So we had the red, we had the blue, we had the white -- there was only green left, basically. You're not going to do anything in orange or pink.''